


Though Hope is Frail

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Biblical References, Character Study, During Canon, Family Feels, Gen, Loss of Faith, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Resistance, TSCC references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:57:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5455688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do you thank a dead man for bringing you back to life? Or: Kyle Reese is a miracle. But he’s not alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though Hope is Frail

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vulpesvortex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpesvortex/gifts).



Kyle Reese is a miracle.

At least, that’s what his mother used to call him, when he was little—littler—and before she stepped on a landmine back in ’10. Any kid born within a year or two of Judgment Day didn’t stand much of a chance of living through its violent, hungry aftermath, so there aren’t many others his age roaming the wasteland, but Kyle survives.

Dad says it’s because Reeses are hard to kill, but then he starves to death before Kyle’s tenth birthday, making sure his boys stay fed while they’re both too young to realize what he’s doing.

It’s hard to believe in miracles after that, but Kyle tries, for his family’s sake.

Derek helps. He wraps his brother’s skinny fingers around too-big triggers and makes him practice shooting at scrap metal and ruined brick façades until the callouses and muscle memory harden. He shows Kyle how to track and kill vermin, and he never teases Kyle for crying over that one beautiful, dead deer. Perhaps most importantly, he finds them a band of Resistance fighters to latch onto. Even if they’re barely connected to Headquarters, it’s one of the bigger groups that’s got enough food and water to go around most of the time. And they don’t hurt little boys.

Kyle turns thirteen in a world with barely any teenagers, but he has his brother, his wits, and a seasoned sniper’s aim. Maybe that’s not miraculous, but it’s something.

***

After his brother catches a bullet in the neck during an H-K raid, Kyle stops believing in anything but his overwhelming need to destroy Skynet.

They bury Derek with a red band wrapped around his arm, at the foot of a thick tree near the base of a hill where Kyle can return, if he wants. Marty says that’s the difference between humans and machines—burying the dead—but he doesn’t say whether or not the suppressed urge to scream into the red-eyed, razor-sharp night is uniquely human, too. With Derek dead, there’s no one Kyle trusts enough to ask.

The L.A. branch loses its last vestiges of contact with the Resistance a few months down the line, in late ’16, and even Dad’s old shortwave radio gives out. With no trackers and no transport, their surviving group of five is effectively stranded, and there’s nothing Kyle can do because he’s not yet fifteen, he’s a poor mechanic at best, and the Resistance doesn’t officially take child soldiers anyway, even ones who haven’t been kids in a long, long time.

By the year’s end, the other four are dying from whatever a three-day-old coyote carcass had been carrying. Kyle had eaten it, too, same as the rest of them, but by grit or luck or antibodies or something else entirely, the parasite doesn’t touch him. He digs graves for each of them by moonlight, because it’s hard to care anymore about whether Skynet or another coyote gets him. Neither does, though, and he starts stockpiling supplies and rigging tripwires and traps for errant metal, mostly for lack of anything better to do.

***

Star shows up like a message he can’t decipher—literally can’t, as she doesn’t say a word and their ability to communicate through improvised hand signals isn’t exactly nuanced. She isn’t affectionate or angry, but she’s devilishly clever, and if her hands are too small for most of the guns stashed in their shell of a factory, well, then, it’s Kyle’s job to make sure no machines get close enough for that to be a problem.

They’re a good team, if an odd one, and it takes Kyle most of a year to realize that she’s keeping him alive as much as vice versa. He wonders if that’s how Derek had felt when he’d been Kyle’s age and Kyle had been about Star’s—like having someone to stay alive for was its own kind of faith.

Still, they’re stuck. There’s no one else in L.A., no one outside who knows to come get them, and no feasible way to venture into the desert long enough to find anybody else. Taking out individual T-600 units is a bleak little goal in the scheme of things, but it’s all they have until near-indestructible machines or their own too-fragile bodies end the campaign.

***

Then Marcus Wright shows up, swaggering but strangely ignorant. His fixes the radio and a car, and, in what feels like the space of a few short minutes, they’re leaving L.A. behind in the dust as Star stares intently into the approaching horizon. Kyle sets the image of Derek’s tree in his mind and hopes to never return to this city, the only home he’s ever known.

Marcus doesn’t make sense, but, for whatever reason, he stays on their side. When he screams Kyle’s name from outside the containment unit, when dozens of others are being carted away to death, too, Kyle notices a flicker of a long-dead feeling that’s almost like having his brother again, the faint comfort of someone trying to look out for him.

And Kyle’s not an idiot, either; no one would have known to come looking for him by name at Skynet Central, let alone the man behind those Resistance broadcasts, without Marcus. So machine or not, infiltrator or not, metal skull and red eyes and a dead man’s face or not, it’s hard not to think afterwards that, at the very least, he’s earned his burial, armband and all.

***

Finally joining the Resistance is everything Kyle had dreamed, even the dark and dirty pieces. There’s an unending war against an indestructible and unstoppable enemy, but, for the first time in a long time, Kyle isn’t fighting alone. The tide of anger that has coursed through him since Derek’s death starts to shift into a new urgency to build, not just destroy. He volunteers for every job, ignoring questions about his age, learns quick, and earns the closeness to his commander that people seem to find suspect.

Star, now almost a teenager herself, still doesn’t talk, but she falls in with Kate and the other medics, bandaging up the worst of their army’s injuries with an enigmatic smile and a clear-eyed confidence in her ability to fix them all. She needs less protection now, having finally grown into what had been Derek’s favorite revolver, but Kyle keeps an eye on her anyway. It’s what brothers do.

They breed dogs now, the Resistance. Infiltrator units—real ones, machines that know they’re heartless metal made to kill—have started cropping up everywhere, and though the humans know a few of the telltale visages Skynet prefers, a healthy German Shepherd is still the best detector. Plus, the puppies put smiles on most people’s faces, even John’s. Kyle likes them, too, and wonders sometimes what they would’ve thought of Marcus, if the dogs would’ve seen his beating heart as human, or near enough.

He knows his own answer. He also learns how to make plastique.

***

The first time Kyle Reese meets him, he thinks, _John Connor is a miracle_ , and there’s not a trace of irony in his mind.

He recognizes the thought for what it is—desperate relief from escaping certain death. But the thing is, that feeling never goes away, even well after Marcus lies buried under a different tree by a hill. John becomes far more than a voice over the airwaves, and Kyle is part of a family again, albeit one where only his commander calls him by his first name and everyone else remains skeptical that he can hold his own.

John never doubts that Kyle’s rightful place is by his side, though, and his certainty is almost miraculous. Kyle fingers the fraying sleeve of his jacket sometimes and thinks about John’s heartbeat and how this life was worth surviving for.

He admits it all to John one night, near the end of a long watch: how everything in him had shuddered to a stop after Derek’s death, how Marcus had started it all over, how John himself had suddenly and then slowly got Kyle believing in miracles again. John ducks his head, looking more self-conscious in the dim light than Kyle has ever seen him. His hand drifts to the center of his chest, and there’s a visible gratitude in the arch of his fingers as they linger on the worn cotton covering that thick mess of scars.

Neither of them really knew Marcus—he had barely known himself, it seemed—but John had never needed anyone to connect the dots for him. Kyle knows in his bones that they share an unspoken debt.

How do you thank a dead man for bringing you back to life?

John quotes the Bible—“whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world”—and suggests Kyle remember that strange kindness by passing it onto someone else. It’s a nice thought, but Kyle doubts he’ll ever have the opportunity to save someone like that, so transformatively, in just a few short days.

He doesn’t put much stock in the Bible anyway, not like some pockets of civilians do. Mom used to recite the good stories once in a while, just to have something to tell, but she’d say the rest was mostly plagues and disasters, and they had lived enough of those already. There’s nothing new that anyone needs to know about the wrath of gods or tyrants.

John tells him stories about prophets and wise men, and Kyle listens because he likes the sound of his commander’s voice. It’s not until he inherits a battered Polaroid that Kyle realizes John never thought those stories were about him.

Kyle watches the defense grid in Topanga Canyon go dark, and it occurs to him that all of his own stories, everything that did and didn’t happen since Judgment Day, have led to this.

The Bible had miracles in it, too, but no tangle of printed words could compare to living in the wake of real ones every day. The last thing he sees, as he steps his bare feet into a cloud of blue lightning, before it all goes dark, is a sturdy tree by a hill.

***

A handful of hours later—or many decades earlier, depending on how you count—a beautiful, scared, fiery young woman who has more of a will to live than anyone Kyle has ever met asks him to tell her about John and the world he came from.

“He was a miracle,” Kyle tells Sarah in the small hours he has to change her life. “But he wasn’t the only one.”

**Author's Note:**

> Dear vulpesvortex: Happy Yuletide! I hope you liked your story, and that 2016 proceeds without any Skynet interference :)
> 
> John's quote is actually from the [Talmud](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talmud), although this particular line was popularized by the 1993 film [Schindler’s List](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/quotes?item=qt0234863), which followed a righteous Gentile who saved more than a thousand Jews from concentration camps and death during World War II.
> 
> The title is from “[When You Believe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gur8ccqrQ9c),” off of the [Prince of Egypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt_\(soundtrack\)) soundtrack.
> 
> There is no Yuletide but what we make, and I owe so much to [ilostmyshoe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) and [red_b_rackham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham), who betaed this without having even seen the movie, because they're _that_ fantastic.


End file.
